Chapter 1 – Why Care About State & Local Government?
1.3 Because You Have a Civic Responsibility to Participate
Caring about state and local government is not only about how it affects you or how you can influence it. It is also about fulfilling your civic responsibility. Living in a democracy comes with rights, but it also comes with duties. These duties include staying informed, voting, serving on juries, and contributing to the well-being of your community.
Civic responsibility refers to the duties individuals have to support the well-being of their political community. These duties include voting in elections, following fair laws, serving on juries, and contributing to the common good through community service or other forms of participation.
When people choose not to participate, decisions are left to a smaller group, and the system becomes weaker.
In the next chapter, we will return to the idea of civic responsibility when discussing the framers of the Constitution, the leaders who wrote and established the U.S. Constitution and designed our system of government. Several believed the government they created could only succeed if citizens stayed active and engaged.
In other words, the structure of the system alone was not enough. It required people to participate for democracy to work as intended.
